Ubisoft Takes Us Behind the Scenes of Tom Clancy’s The Division

The Game Developers Conference which began Monday featured a tantalizing teaser today for fans of the Tom Clancy series as Ubisoft gave a peak at the newly developed Snowdrop engine which will power the upcoming title, Tom Clancy's The Division. Specifically tooled to support developers in creating games with new layers of detail through node-based scripting, the short video released today takes viewers into the studio at Massive Entertainment showcasing the Snowdrop engine and how it helps the creative process.

"The core of the Snowdrop engine is a node-based scripting system; this is really the beating heart of the engine that allows us to do what we do," said Christian Savoie, Lead UI Programmer at Massive Entertainment. "It allows us to quickly develop our assets and to preview them and to interact in ways that have never been done before in the industry."

Following the early December video uploaded to Youtube by Ubisoft, and mentioned on Massive's own website; this latest teaser sheds technical light on how Ubisoft is approaching the next generation of video games with Tom Clancy's The Division. The new engine as compared to Lego by one of the artists in the video provides artists and programmers with building blocks that can be custom-tailored to their vision streamlining the process between conceptualization and production development with real-time testing of environmental objects and effects along with other in-game assets within the confines of the entire engine system dynamic.

"We wanted to go better, not bigger," said Anders Holmquist, Technical Director at Massive Entertainment. "The engine should also support how we work in the studio, which is a lot of quick iterations of features that have a lot of creativity and the freedom to experiment and prototype."